This is a case of a 20 year old bong a 15 year old who's parents found out are are pissed. This woman may be pissed because it didn't give her daughter the career boost she hoped for. I'm just inferring from the strange comment about the daughter trying to make it in the entertainment business.

The kid would have known better than to go after jailbait. Under age sex is bad but calling that kind of thing rape just makes things harder for actual rape cases.

Gwendolyn:The kid would have known better than to go after jailbait. Under age sex is bad but calling that kind of thing rape just makes things harder for actual rape cases.

Having an age of consent is retarded.

I'm much more grossed out by a 21 year old woman being married off to a 21 year old man by their families than even a 25 year old man and 15 year old girl dating of their own volition. Sure there might be some developmental issues or something, but there's plenty of teenage/adult marriages that have worked and plenty of adult/adult marriages that have failed. Relationships are too complicated to regulate explicitly by law. The best you can hope for is a rule of thumb.

Thus the only just way to examine such cases is individually. If it is determined that there has been victimization, let punishment be applied. If it was actual rape, hang 'em. If it was consensual, that's life. In the grey areas, case by case.

It's too bad she didn't enjoy it because he looks like a handsome young man. Which begs the question of why he needed to rape her in the first place instead of just seducting her with his own natural charms. Kids are just too impatient nowadays, feel the need to just rapeaway right now instead of taking a chance with seduction and the possibility that he might not sex her like right right now.

What is disturbing is that she kept coming back to him of her own free will, then pulls out the victim card when someone whispers in her ear to sue. She will probably get some go away money, and will cause hell to Hopper because of idiotic age of consent laws. But the case falls apart when she kept going back to him for more of whatever.

They met over the internet and she decide to take the next step and meet face to face. The article didn't accuse him of using a date rape drug, so she presumably consumed the alcohol and drugs willingly. This relationship apparently went on like this for months. This sounds less like rape and more like your typical teenage relationship.

As far as the age thing, 15 and 20 is pushing it, but still close enough in age to not be to big of a deal. Slap him on the wrist for under age drinking and supplying a minor with alcohol and call it a day.

fusillade762:According to Herman, Hopper plied the teenager with alcohol and drugs before the assault.

Pabst and nitrous?

well played.

FTFA: "Jane Doe's attorney says multiple incidents of sexual assault occurred in the months that followed... and eventually, his client told her mom who is now suing the up-and-coming actor - who last appeared in the film "Restless" - for unspecified damages."

how does this work? multiple incidents?

total shakedown. i hope this girl's mom gets sued for slander or something. what a joke.

Hillbilly Jim:Banacek: Having a news conference to announced you were raped seems like an odd way to handle it. Then again, replying with a 'No comment' is an odd way to defend yourself when accused of rape.

No comment is the exact right way to answer anything about criminal or civil charge.

I guess so. I wonder if 'no comment' really was 'please talk to our legal counsel which is handling this case'.

None you slanderous, beef-witted, sallow-skinned corpuscle. I've always dated older women. An indeed nature has seen fit to create this thing called puberty whereby you can pretty much draw the line.

Drawing upon that oft used chestnut of how to identify what is wrong: We shall know it when we see it. In Saudi Arabia, there's outrage over a 15 year old girl who was sold to a 90 year old man to be his wife. We can all agree that's wrong. Both the age difference, which is horrible, and the selling of the daughter, which is much more horrible. Saudi Arabia's messed up.

But in the States, thanks to people's attempts to quantify numerically what cannot be quantified numerically, there is or was a boy of 18 sentenced to 10 years hard time for a consensual relationship with his 17 year old girlfriend at the time. Such insanity is the hallmark of poor legal practices and there is no potential good that might be gained by having a law that would allow such a miscarriage of justice to occur on the books for any length of time. Far better to keep it case by case than risk ruining lives that would have been happy but for an arbitrary number produced ex recto.

doglover:Gwendolyn: The kid would have known better than to go after jailbait. Under age sex is bad but calling that kind of thing rape just makes things harder for actual rape cases.

Having an age of consent is retarded.

I'm much more grossed out by a 21 year old woman being married off to a 21 year old man by their families than even a 25 year old man and 15 year old girl dating of their own volition. Sure there might be some developmental issues or something, but there's plenty of teenage/adult marriages that have worked and plenty of adult/adult marriages that have failed. Relationships are too complicated to regulate explicitly by law. The best you can hope for is a rule of thumb.

Thus the only just way to examine such cases is individually. If it is determined that there has been victimization, let punishment be applied. If it was actual rape, hang 'em. If it was consensual, that's life. In the grey areas, case by case.

You realize that would mean the courts would be clogged into a virtual stand-still, right? Right now, you can look at a simple metric and determine if the case has merit, i.e what are the three relevant numbers (his age, her age, the age of consent). I fthey match up one way, you begin collecting evidence to see if you canmake a case; if they match up another way, you simply do not proceed. But if everything is a complete crapshoot, you are required to investigate virtually everything, as you have no idea if a crime has been committed or not without in-depth investigation. You would have to invent an entirely new police force just to deal with sexual conflict. Yes, the number is arbitrary. But that doesn't mean abolishing it leads to happy-funtime nirvana.

Gwendolyn:Under age sex is bad but calling that kind of thing rape just makes things harder for actual rape cases.

I would agree if we were talking about a 16 or 17 year old boy, but he was 20. He wasn't another high school student whose girlfriend was a grade or two below him; he was an adult, certainly old enough to know better. Even if the girl did consent, and she very well might have, that's still farking creepy any way you slice it.

He might not be a paedophile, but he's absolutely guilty of statutory rape in this case (assuming that he did it).

phalamir:You would have to invent an entirely new police force just to deal with sexual conflict.

How many cases like this even come up of a year? A handful per jurisdiction? I doubt it's even that much.

If they'd just legalize corporal punishment for a large variety of misdemeanors, you could expedite any number of cases simply by saying "Look, plead no contest, we smack your ass really hard, and then expunge the record, by the time your butt heals, you name is clear." That's called win-win. Most cases would take hours and we wouldn't even need a secretary because the whole thing would be just expunged anyway. All we'd really need to free up a million court officials is a lot of alcohol wipes in the "butt" size, a selection of burnable bamboo canes, a few cans of liquid bandage, and a paper shredder large enough to handle manila folders at each court house. All the minor cases would be over in minutes.

doglover:phalamir: You would have to invent an entirely new police force just to deal with sexual conflict.

How many cases like this even come up of a year? A handful per jurisdiction? I doubt it's even that much.

If they'd just legalize corporal punishment for a large variety of misdemeanors, you could expedite any number of cases simply by saying "Look, plead no contest, we smack your ass really hard, and then expunge the record, by the time your butt heals, you name is clear." That's called win-win. Most cases would take hours and we wouldn't even need a secretary because the whole thing would be just expunged anyway. All we'd really need to free up a million court officials is a lot of alcohol wipes in the "butt" size, a selection of burnable bamboo canes, a few cans of liquid bandage, and a paper shredder large enough to handle manila folders at each court house. All the minor cases would be over in minutes.

doglover:Thus the only just way to examine such cases is individually. If it is determined that there has been victimization, let punishment be applied. If it was actual rape, hang 'em. If it was consensual, that's life. In the grey areas, case by case.

The problem with this is one of relative ages of mental competence. It's a little silly to say that people aren't mentally competent to, say, take out a car loan outside of stringent restrictions until they're 18, but they're totally responsible enough to have sex across a five-year age gap between a partner that's legally independent and one that isn't without any worries about exploitation when they're 15. It's dumb to try to prevent teenagers from having sex, and it's equally dumb to let adults take advantage of the inevitability of teenagers to be responsible for their own behavior, so we split the different and do the age of consent plus romeo and juliet caveats bit.

Also... do you not remember being fifteen? I wasn't mentally competent to handle the relationships with the people my own age I was sleeping with without all sorts of farked-up shiat going on, anyone over 20 that sought that shiat out would pretty definitely have been intentionally exploiting my impaired state of mind.

Kevin72:It's too bad she didn't enjoy it because he looks like a handsome young man. Which begs the question of why he needed to rape her in the first place instead of just seducting her with his own natural charms. Kids are just too impatient nowadays, feel the need to just rapeaway right now instead of taking a chance with seduction and the possibility that he might not sex her like right right now.

0_oAlso, rape doesn't occur because a person is ugly and can't get any. That's not how that works. It's also not due to laziness.

Nice graphic you got there, too bad it's a lie.Unreported incidents are just that, unreported. And hard to pin down. The source information for that graphic is from the Statistics from Justice Department, National Crime Victimization Survey: 2006-2010 and FBI reports. Long story short, the expected percentage of reported rape is 35% (Still disgustingly low, but that's another rant) that graphic shows less than a third of that number. (10%) although it still cites the source that says 35%...The truth is bad enough. Exaggeration (or making numbers up out of thin air) doesn't help.

Nice graphic you got there, too bad it's a lie.Unreported incidents are just that, unreported. And hard to pin down. The source information for that graphic is from the Statistics from Justice Department, National Crime Victimization Survey: 2006-2010 and FBI reports. Long story short, the expected percentage of reported rape is 35% (Still disgustingly low, but that's another rant) that graphic shows less than a third of that number. (10%) although it still cites the source that says 35%...The truth is bad enough. Exaggeration (or making numbers up out of thin air) doesn't help.

Nice graphic you got there, too bad it's a lie.Unreported incidents are just that, unreported. And hard to pin down. The source information for that graphic is from the Statistics from Justice Department, National Crime Victimization Survey: 2006-2010 and FBI reports. Long story short, the expected percentage of reported rape is 35% (Still disgustingly low, but that's another rant) that graphic shows less than a third of that number. (10%) although it still cites the source that says 35%...The truth is bad enough. Exaggeration (or making numbers up out of thin air) doesn't help.

So you say.

From their website: (bold is mine)"Sarah Pierson Beaulieu is the founder of The Enliven Project. She has had nearly 35 years of experience as a human and over 15 years experience in managing complex relationships and partnerships, fundraising, and systematic approaches to change. She is a survivor and a truth teller, a poet, a semi-psychic, wife, mom, and a loyal friend."

I'm sorry that's not a qualification. I might ask what she did before she was human, but I'm afraid she would actually have an answer.And lying about the numbers isn't helping.